this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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The problem with tankies has nothing to do with communism, i'm a communist, that's not the problem at all.
The problem with tankies is that they're authoritarian genocide deniers. The GPL doesn't have any authoritarianism or genocide denial in it.
The LEAD DEV denies the genocide Uyghurs in china. It's much worse than you're assuming.
Yeah! Definitely, I understand that! But in my neck of the woods "tankies" are more just boogeymen that people throw around when they want to cast an entire group as immoral. It's not that they don't exist, but they aren't gaining power either. It just seems like an appeal to fear (a reasonable one at that), but using illogical framing that doesn't at all represent reality. That's the fundemental crux of it for me. It may come to bite me in the future too! Growing up in conservative parts in the U.S. I've grown numb to people claiming others are communists - it comes across as more a technique for division than any real concern of community harm.
I'm not trying be an apologist for the devs opinions or detract from them as much as I'm trying to state that open source, and this project - given its git history - doesn't appear to spread authoritarianism. I didn't sign an agreement to violently seize the means of production upon cloning the repository. Had this information not been swirling around on reddit (and now lemmy) I would've never known that I had to "cancel" yet another thing.
I mean, personally, I'd rather fork it and make it into a vision that the people of Tucson want in their social media experience. Lemmy is a bit better architected, and I think the codebase is a bit more mature for such thing.
Yes, I agree that lemmy doesn't have any politics injected into the code, and that's why i'm on lemmy, but the devs are definitely politically fucked up.
I think this is a pretty good neutral intro.
That font is going to be terrible for dyslexics, though.
See from my own neck of the woods, 'tankies' describes something with actual power, albeit very minor and entirely online. I've seen a shocking amount of online leftist communities infiltrated and taken over by them, with real earnest critiques about housing prices and wealth inequality diluted by worship of whichever anti-US dictator has caught their attention today. They'll suck all the air out of the room, ban dissenters as 'libs', and then using the excuse "No Punching Left" remove criticisms of their weird ass views about Kim Jong-un and Putin.
I get that this might not be a widespread usage, but in left leaning online spaces it's a useful descriptor just because it keeps fucking happening and it actively shits up whichever community it happens to. I wish they were fucking boogeymen, honestly.
The fear, I guess, is that given how many there already are in lemmy (I guess including the devs? yeesh), they might pre-emptively poison the well in some way.
Yeah, that tracks. I'll grant you that there are those left spaces on reddit that can get really tankie really quickly. (I don't go to the ones in the fediverse - might eventually lurk tho with a critical mind of course).
I just find myself dismissing them pretty easily and making my own space. Left politics got really weird and counterproductive, so I found /r/TraumaAndPolitics and made that a small space that had some pretty interesting leftist conversation through a language of trauma. (I had made /r/TraumaInformedPolicy, but only found /r/TraumaAndPolitics a few days later, but we made the subs around the same time, oddly enough).
I suppose I shouldn't dismiss the experiences of those who stayed at the expense of authoritarian communist propaganda and have likely been damaged in some way because of it.
It's just that I find this fear counterproductive when it comes to building communities, if we're betting that most people aren't going to like Authoritarian Communisim (and that's a damn good bet) then the idea is to get as many people into the community as possible as fast as possible.
I have some on-the-ground ideas that I'll experiment with for tucson.social and report back when we see how that works.
As a person who hasn't really looked up the issue(I mean I have read about it on the net here n there, but have never dived into the issue deeply), I have seen people talking about it on both sides and I'm confused.
The main things I'm hearing from people who say that a genocide isn't happening are:
Most of the times I've seen it, both sides accuse each other of being blinded by propaganda and the convo devolves there.
Which side is actually right here?